False claims question Haley’s eligibility to serve as US president
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during a campaign stop, Saturday, Dec. 30, 2023, in Coralville, Iowa. Haley is eligible for the presidency, despite claims otherwise on social media. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
CLAIM: Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Haley is a natural-born U.S. citizen who is eligible to serve as president. The former ambassador to the United Nations was born on Jan. 20, 1972, in Bamberg, South Carolina, according to information on her official website when she was governor of the state.
THE FACTS: With the Iowa caucuses just two weeks away, some on social media are erroneously claiming that Haley, who served as governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, cannot legally hold the country’s highest office.
“Nikki Haley is Constitutionally ineligible to be President….or Vice President,” reads one post on X, formerly Twitter, that had received approximately 6,900 likes and shares as of Tuesday. The post links to an article that argues Haley is ineligible because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.
In her 2012 autobiography, Haley wrote that her parents “were born in the Punjab region of India.” Haley’s office told South Carolina newspaper The State in 2015, when she was governor, that her father, Ajit Randhawa, became a U.S. citizen in 1978 — six years after Haley’s birth — while her mother, Raj Randhawa, was naturalized in 2003.
But experts agree Haley is a legitimate candidate as defined by the Constitution, regardless of her parents’ citizenship status. Her birth in Bamberg makes her a natural-born citizen, one of three qualifications to hold the U.S. presidency.
“Having been born in South Carolina, she is clearly a ‘natural born citizen,’ without regard to the fact that her parents were immigrants,” Geoffrey Stone, a professor of Law at the University of Chicago who is an expert on constitutional law, told The Associated Press.
Stone called claims otherwise “bonkers” and said that there are no legitimate arguments that would disqualify Haley from the presidency based on her parents’ citizenship.
The Constitution stipulates that the president must be “a natural born citizen” of the U.S., be at least 35 years old and have been a U.S. resident for at least 14 years. The 14th Amendment clarifies that anyone born in the country is a U.S. citizen, with exceptions for the children of people whose allegiance belongs to another nation, such as those of foreign diplomats.
Similar false claims that Vice President Kamala Harris is not legally eligible to serve as U.S. vice president or president because of her parents’ citizenship have previously spread online.
Haley’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
